Wednesday, 20 January 2016

FILM 1459: WILD STRAWBERRIES

TRIVIA: Ingmar Bergman has
described in the interview how he came up with the idea while driving from
Stockholm to Dalarna, stopping in Uppsala where he had been born and raised,
and driving by outside his grandmother's old house, when he suddenly began to
think about how it would be if he could open the door and inside it would be
just as it had been during his childhood. "So it struck me - what if you
could make a film about this; that you just walk up in a realistic way and open
a door, and then you walk into your childhood, and then you open another door and
come back to reality, and then you make a turn around a street corner and
arrive in some other period of your existence, and everything goes on, lives.
That was actually the idea behind Wild
Strawberries (1957)"

Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer says that
several scenes had to be shot indoors due to Victor Sjöström's poor
health. "We had to make some very bad back-projection in the car because
we never knew if Victor would come back alive the next day." Nevertheless,
as long as Victor was home by 5:15 P.M. each day, "and had his whiskey
punctually, all went well."

The dummy that Isak Borg mistakes
for a pedestrian during the dream sequence was constructed from a balloon and a
silk stocking.